


son of fire

by agnes_writes



Category: The Poppy War - R. F. Kuang
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 03:00:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30082437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agnes_writes/pseuds/agnes_writes
Summary: Altan Trengsin is an enigma.A hero. A villain. A legend. A monster.But more than anything, he was just a boy who burned too bright, and wanted too much.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	son of fire

**Author's Note:**

> I actually wrote this right after I finished Book 1 of The Poppy War because I absolutely adored Altan's character, he was so complex and layered and my writer half-brain couldn't resist trying to deep-dive into his head.
> 
> I've since finished the last book in the trilogy but I still did want to post this fic with a couple of edits, because it's just so interesting to see where my mindset was after Book 1, so I hope you like it!

He’d always been fond of the sky.

It felt free, the vast horizon that twinkled with stars above him. Untamed, unexplored, but oh-so calm. He liked it better than fire, though it would be foolish to admit it to anyone. Fire was what brought his family, his country together. It’s a powerful thing, his mother had told him, as she lulled him to sleep at night. It’s what his ancestors discovered eons ago, used it to hone their weapons, to keep warm, to feed their families.

Where there is fire, there is humanity.

But Altan had been burned, once. Careless little fool, he ran around in their kitchen and caught the flame of a candle, and he cried, hands growing angry red welts that stung with every ointment his mother treated them with. And when the pain got too much, she’d given Altan a tonic for sleep to claim him, and he’d slipped away staring at the faint, glimmering stars outside his window. They were peaceful. They were comforting. They were constant.

The sky had always been safe for him, and so he found solace in it.

As his hands healed, Altan understood, too, the danger of the power that fire held. It was a double-edged sword, the amount of destruction it could have in the wrong hands, uncontrolled and wild.

In some strange way, he understood why they—The Federation? Nikara itself? Altan couldn’t be sure anymore—had been terrified of the fire that his people held.

It was why they doused it.

They slaughtered his people like animals in a butcher’s shop, and Altan could never sleep without hearing their screams. Men, women, even children, and red flowed onto the shores of Speer.

Then they took him in for themselves.

Altan would say he’d rather have killed him with the others, but… he was afraid to die. He’d been young, alone, terrified. The last of his kind. And all he wanted to do was live.

He changed his tune soon enough.

His prison cell was windowless, the air stale, the floors damp and disgusting. His skin had been riddled with scars from the needles forced into it, his chest barely healing from the scalpel they’d used to cut it open night after night after night. Altan felt his fear nettling into rage so potent he was sure he could kill Dr. Shiro with the power of his glare. He’d remember little but pain, and pleasure, his pulse shooting up to the sky in a hazy high that he’d thought was what happiness was.

Altan didn’t see the sky for a long time.

Then again, he’d never be sober enough to appreciate it, anyway. Perhaps it was better that way.

When he was rescued, the first thing he did was stare at the night sky on the roofs of the Academy. Sinegard was breathtaking, sure, but it reeked of human chaos—greed and desperation leaked out of every crevice and cobblestone. It was definitely no Big Dipper or Orion dancing across the cosmos. Master Irjah had worried about his nightly escapades, though he did nothing more than quietly watch the clouds form shapes and hide the moon in the sky. He had feared Altan had lost his sanity in the years they’d held him captive.

That was when the needles came back.

That was when the Phoenix had shown itself in his mind, and Altan had embraced it with such welcoming arms because it was the only thing familiar in his life that he realized too late he had no idea how to control it.

The Phoenix crowded his thoughts then, when he was at his weakest, his most vulnerable. It had shaped the fury he had into a weapon that _burned._

He wanted to make things burn.

Altan would still see the sky, still watch it when his mind was quiet and his own, though those times get more and more sparce the more often he’d convened with the Phoenix, and it always brought the same calm that the fire burning within him never did. Always there, waiting for him to bask in its beauty.

In those silent moments, he’d feel content. He was safe. He was _alive, here._ He made it. He’d do good, he’d finish what his people started, do them proud. He’s the best there is at Sinegard, after all. He’s on top of the world, and he’d fight for the Speerlies’ justice.

But the Phoenix is greedy, wanting more and more of him, and he couldn’t say no. It claimed Altan’s mind as its own, and he couldn’t do anything but revel in fury it had staked on his heart. He’d burn every single one of them to the ground and laugh, just they had when they’d murdered his kind.

The little shred of humanity left in him was fragile, and it screamed against that notion, that desire.

The thought should have scared him.

But it didn’t.

The Cike were kind, if a little eccentric. Tyr was a flawed leader, impatient and strict, but kind when it really mattered. He’d found familiarity in all of them—Ramsa, with his skill with pyrotechnics, Baji with his thirst for destruction, Suni with his uncontrollable bursts of emotion, Unegen with his fear, Qara with her wariness—an outsider in a band of outsiders.

And Chaghan… _Chaghan._ Altan felt like he knew Chaghan best, had delved a little deeper than he had with the others. Chaghan had made him feel wanted. Alive. And he’d never truly figured out why his heart had felt at home when he was with him, but Altan thinks that the world was right when he was with him.

Altan finally belongs. That should have been enough.

But it wasn’t.

The Phoenix whispered in his ear, and he’d end up craving more. More power. Tyr wasn’t nearly doing as much as he wanted, wasn’t letting him unleash the full potential he held. He had a god with him, they all did, couldn’t he see that?

In Tyr’s death, Altan thought he finally gotten what he wanted. A position. Power.

Then Rin came.

And she was just like him, so familiar and so _real_ , and for the first time he didn’t feel alone, he wasn’t the last Speerly, not anymore, and he could have wept if the Phoenix allowed for any show of weakness, if it hadn’t melded into his very being and his insatiable desire for revenge had not consumed him.

Perhaps… that’s why he brought her along. That’s why he kept her close. That’s why he tried to teach her the power he knew she had, like him. Because if he survived it, why can’t she? She could be like him, and they could raze the world together until there was nothing but smoke and ashes for ever wronging them, for stealing away the lives they could have had, for looking down on them with such cruelty and treating them like monsters that they could not be anything but.

But she couldn’t.

And he hated her for that. She was weak, wasn’t she? She wasn’t like him.

On the nights he couldn’t sleep, Altan wondered whether she was lucky for that.

He regrets hurting her, regrets laying a finger on her that made her look at him with such fear and anger because she was all he had left, and he loved her and showed it the only way he knew how. He loved her, and perhaps that’s what it took to make him realize.

Perhaps that’s why he let her go. Perhaps it was because he saw that she was so much better than he would ever be, and that she had much more of a chance win living a life not filled with hatred as he did.

Rin would do better than him. Altan was sure of it.

So he told her to swim, to let him finish his business here. His last stand, his final revenge.

She looked back at him, desperate, terrified of being alone, anguished, and Altan had recognized the look in her eye as his own, from so many years ago.

Altan wanted to say more, to reassure her, but there’d been no time, so he gave her a sad smile and hoped she could see everything he wanted to tell her in it.

_I’m sorry._

_Do better._

_Tell the Cike I’ll miss them._

_Tell Chaghan it’s neither of your fault._

_Tell him I love him._

_I love you, too._

_Do me proud._

He took a deep breath, and Altan heard the splash of water behind him, and set himself alight.

 _One last look,_ he thought.

_Look up at the stars for me, Rin. Please._

And as he stood there dying, surrounded by the people he’d long wished to destroy, flames licking his skin, the inferno burning what little is left of his soul, his very essence, Altan found comfort in the sky above him one last time.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Tell me what you think, all thoughts are incredibly appreciated! Stay lovely!


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